Let’s get the inevitable out of the way first: This isn’t a clone of Metal Gear Solid. This isn’t even a mutated-claw-handed-lump-of-skin-and-fleshy-sinew-on-a-scientist’s-gurney-pleading-for-a-quick-death clone-gone-wrong of Metal Gear Solid. Instead, think Pac-Man. Winback 2 is essentially the closest we’ve come to a three-dimensional maze hunt, complete with action elements that attempt to distract you from an overly simplified gameplay structure. This may have worked at the tail end of the Nintendo 64’s lifespan, but at the tail end of this console cycle it just doesn’t cut it.

“Special” Forces

Winback 2‘s premise is simple and follows a tried-and-tested formula. You’re controlling a badass Special Forces member as he infiltrates a building consisting of a network of corridors and rooms. All the familiar stereotypes are here: there’s the Tom Cruise-looking guy, the Ving Rhames dude, and the fiery Latino lady, all of whom are commanded by a bald veteran who sounds a bit like Donald Trump. Your tasks are straightforward (becoming more painfully so the further you play): wander around buildings capping bad guys and solving puzzles, then replay each mission from a teammate’s perspective. This means you get to reuse the same territory twice and witness what knock-on effect your first run had the second time through. The bad guys are faceless, goggle-wearing henchmen appearing in marginally different uniforms, sprinkled with bosses who own drug cartels and have names like Felix Arango.

The game starts off with a tutorial that’s more thorough than is necessary. Next up are your actual missions, each of which takes place in a perfectly reasonable — but graphically average — setting, such as a mansion, an airport, or a warehouse. Interactivity is kept to a minimum; you can’t shoot a chandelier so it drops down on a foe’s head, for example. You can’t affect scenery except for destructible boxes that hold “drugs” (which actually look like small, gold Dolby Labs symbols), and you’re given continuous mission updates once you finish a task, which are completely linear in nature.

Groundhog Day with Rapid-Fire Ordnance

You’re given a map of the entire level, so you’ll end up staring at the bottom left corner of your screen more than the action itself. The action is fairly repetitive: You’ll enter a corridor, blast a goon (but do it from cover as there’s little in the way of health), and follow the red blinking dot on the map to the next corridor, blasting two more goons as you go. This is interspersed with doors that require unlocking (and by “unlocking” we mean “shooting the blinking orange/cyan square so it becomes cyan”) or laser wires that can be shut down or leapt through. And that’s pretty much it. The action is almost entertaining, but when the true problems of the game rear up, you’ll become less entertained and more enraged.

There are a number of problems. The roll, open door, and stand behind cover commands are mapped to the same button, so you’ll sometimes want to take cover and end up rolling into a couple of enemies instead. You can’t easily reload and move, or fire and move, so any intuitive techniques you may try result in a quick death. Close combat is a joke if you’re wielding a weapon, since the camera spasmodically shifts to the ceiling while you attempt to back up and fire. Aiming down or up is impressively difficult as the auto-aim only works about half of the time. These problems force you to play through the stage the way the designers want. As a final insult, if you die, you restart the route again. You’ll likely end your games either shattering a gamepad in disgust or memorizing all the rooms over and over again, dying in the final room, and repeating. Essentially, this is Groundhog Day with rapid-fire ordnance.